Lana Del Rey

is playing live not something of an economic necessity these days?

a lot of non-rock major label chart acts do very few concerts or live performances until they have enough hits that they can go out as a headliner, it seems like

I don't know if her miming it would be any help. She has 0 stage presence, esp. for someone who is supposedly a Sinatra-esque sex kitten.

is playing live not something of an economic necessity these days?

depends on where you live & who you know, if you're west coast & near television/movie people there are other roads open but they're generally pretty short roads. being good live is still your best bet though yes.

Playing live is really the only way you make money. If she wants to see any $$$ from her record sales, she's going to need to sell a LOT to cover all they're spending on PR, videos, etc.

don't worry guys I'm sure she'll sell a lot of albums

― dayo, Sunday, January 15, 2012 12:07 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, that's not true: there's licensing, film work, soundtracking, commercials. all kinds of stuff you can do if you make the right kind of music, which she does. playing live is the only way you directly make money from selling your music directly to consumers, yes.

In her particular case though, not being good live doesn't seem to hinder people as all her shows have been sold out. Also the ones after some big telly performances iirc

not being good live doesn't seem to hinder people as all her shows have been sold out.

that's when I reach for my revolver

to kill myself with, I mean

No need to bring it live to bring in that Chipotle-background money.

You know
I'm almost always 100% on the side of the artist when it comes to a lousy showing captured on video
And totes went into that Youtube with the empathy afforded any premature birth
But wow! Just wow!
I would leave the room when it's her turn at karaoke

To Whiney's point, she should've been on Colbert instead of SNL. Then we'd know for certain.

she has a few youtubes of live performances (really old looking ones?) where it she seems to have the basics of singing down

she also has lots where not

glad the blogosphere vetted her as being a good live singer first before splattering her all across our google readers

wow, you guys really built this up to be something utterly dreadful. watching now and her worst crime seems to be stage fright. they're not great performances but i could see them being good if she were less nervous. her high notes are better than i've seen them in the past...

her high notes are better than i've seen them in the past...

when this is the best you can say about somebody maybe they're not ready for television

well snl's cast is known as the "not-ready-for-primetime players"!

that wasn't as bad as I was expecting but it wasn't good at all either

i couldn't get thru the youtube, but tuning doesn't just sound like her problem

mainly had to stop cos of the guitar guy's "into it" head nodding. which screams "holy god we are crashing and burning up here"

I really enjoy watching unintentionally terrible performances (Shannen Doherty in "Friends til the End", for example) and this did not disappoint! In fact the fake opulence of the whole look/sound reminded me a lot of Valley of the Dolls.

It was like Neely and Tony singing "Come Live with Me" in the sanitarium only instead it was Jennifer's talentless dopey little sister playing dress up in a wig and singing about video games to the mirror. I won't say that I like her music because I surely do not, but I love the seriously campy (unintended?) awfulness of this performance.

Without the chutzpah of Nancy Sinatra, she could be a 21st c. Twinkle?

to john's point above, 'video games' has already been on gossip girl. she has lots of pros working with her.

node to LDR: when you mention a word or action you don't have to demonstrate that with your hand.

You want to hear some bad singing, try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQYbnzWuSvk&feature=related

mostly bemused that people care about how stuff sounds live.

this reminds me of when you see someone doing karaoke and they're really "feeling it" but in a way that's humorless and just makes everyone uncomfortable

― tyga mother (J0rdan S.), Sunday, January 15, 2012 10:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

SNL is not the place for feelings

Without the chutzpah of Nancy Sinatra, she could be a 21st c. Twinkle?

twinkle had loads of chutzpah! (because she was crazy, yes.)

mostly bemused that people care about how stuff sounds live.

it's this weird phenomenon of having ears instead of just eyes

i generally don't care that much about how an act sounds live unless i'm paying upwards of $30 to see them play live, but that was also a terrible performance

well i listen to the album rather than looking at the record cover yes
xp

I guess I always think of Twinkle as kind of blank, but honestly I'll take blank over Jessie J clown faces.

she's loaded the clips to her own Facebook (which she has been looking after since day one) so she's obviously not that arsed about it sounding a bit weird. it DID sound weird though no doubt about that.

she sounded great live when i saw her, dead natural. she can cut it live when she wants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgSIz6oHzk&feature=related

:(

Jessie J can't catch a break on any thread today.

That's what SNL should start doing...digital shorts for the musical performances!

LDR SNL performance was like a real version of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdFJTbaFcZ0

Nah, real version of that is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx_GjyXCs4

LOL @ giant mic!

i don't understand the tone of that whiney idolator post at all.

like it kinda seems like he actually believes there's an SNL conspiracy to make artists sound bad?

yes

never listened to her music but my ver of video games is me singing in a v deep husky voice

why do you plaaaaaaaaaaay
video gaaaaaaaaaaaaaames

So have you been practicing all week for SNL?

Well, no, I haven’t because I’ve been working. I don’t even know what I’m singing! I know it’s “Video Games” and I think “Blue Jeans,” but I thought it was supposed to be “Born to Die,” so I have to go figure that out. I better fucking figure that out! There’s a lot going on so there’s a lot of catching up to do.

Are you excited?

Yeah … I’m excited if it goes well. If it doesn’t, I’m gonna kill myself! But yeah, what an honor. And who knows why, but it’s really nice for me.

Expecting a death notice any minute now.

facepalmsmiley.gif tbh

twitter response...was fucking scathing

so i just watched "video games" performance on youtube, was expecting a trainwreck and it really wasn't THAT bad. Wasn't a great performance or anything, she was obviously a bit nervous, but it wasn't horrible...

i feel like everyone has it in for this girl for no good reason, it's kind of creept actually. and i'm not even into her music...

it wasn't a courtney love style trainwreck - which i could see someone anticipating after some of the comments on twitter - but it was still really terrible in an unfortunately amateur way. bc part of her narrative has already become about her inauthenticity (hard to believe in 2012 but there it is), this confirmed something a lot of ppl believed about her. there was also a lot of, i think, honest enthusiasm about her right after video games came out so there was maybe a feeling like she had a huge groundswell of support inexplicably pushing her to become this hot new artist. personally, i loved video games when i first heard it, played it a bunch, played it for a lot of ppl. the following tracks didn't really interest me at all and then i started seeing her live in various venues and she seems to be getting progressively worse with each performance. also, video games was partially really intriguing to me bc of how self-assured and self-possessed and even cocky it all feels, so these performances have been polar opposites of that. she isn't just nervous, but stammering, playacting, she seems like the confused, out of it persona that maybe seemed more ironic when i first heard video games. instead of uncomfortably sincere and frightening.

^yeah, that coupled with the uber-dramatica lighting and the pseudo-wedding gown. i cringed, personally.

A lot of people sound bad on TV (and esp. SNL) so to me her voice was only a small part of the problem. It's her presence that is so difficult to watch. She's not a performer. She radiates discomfort. She's been playing live in public since at least 2008, so maybe it's just not her thing. There are a lot of musicians in this camp.

i think mordy has def pinpointed the problem there, and actually brainwasher bringing up courtney love is apt, because the thing with c-love trainwrecks is that even at her worst those trainwrecks were entirely in keeping with what you expected of courtney. these LDR performances aren't just missing a few notes, it's more fundamentally that she seems completely awkward about inhabiting/conveying her on-record persona. which reinforces what i grew to think after hearing her other songs - "video games" was a weird one-off piece of magic that i'm not expecting her to recapture any time soon.

If you sell yourself as gangsta and you radiate ziggy, things aren't going to go well in the long run.
http://joshreads.com/images/10/09/i100915ziggy.png